By ERIK LOVESTRAND
One thing about nature that you can be sure of is, you ain’t seen nothin yet. Just around that next corner is something that you have never seen before in your life. It doesn’t matter if you are the most seasoned, highly educated naturalist on the planet. There are oodles of delightful discoveries that you have yet to make. Sometimes you happen upon them in your roaming about. Other times they just come to you. That was the case with the two damselflies pictured with this article.
Now, I have seen plenty of damselflies before and even observed them flying in tandem with the male’s tail tip attached near the female’s head. However, I had never before observed a mating pair completely “hooked-up” like this. Literally out of the blue, they landed on my knee while I was sitting by the pool. Without even thinking about the fact that it might be considered a rude invasion of privacy, I whipped out my cell phone and got a decent pic (darn paparazzi are everywhere).
With the world of information available at our fingertips, it didn’t take long to find an explanation for the heart-shaped mating configuration of these winged beauties. Once the male has attached to the female’s head or prothorax, she bends here abdomen down and connects the tip of her tail under the base of his abdomen. This is where she is able to collect his gametes that will fertilize her eggs. Shortly after mating, she will deposit her eggs somewhere near or in the water so her hatching larvae have access to the aquatic environment where they will live until they emerge as adults.
This particular species of damselfly has several different color morphs. It seems that there is a genetic component to this feature but there is also a time factor. As they go through life, they exhibit color changes related to their age also. I have observed orange, copper, blue, and green colored individuals. The biology and life history of damselflies is much more complex than what I have shared here, of course. Some scientists have made careers of collecting data and learning about this fascinating group of insects. I wonder, however, if it was not a detailed fact that sparked their curiosity to learn more, but instead an encounter with a heart-shaped pair of beautiful, winged jewels that came to them out of the blue one day.
Erik Lovestrand is a UF/IFAS regional Sea Grant agent in Wakulla, Franklin and Gulf counties.
